For months, for over a year, non-leftist opponents of the American invasion of Iraq were treated as vermin — isolated and calumniated, when not ignored. Their questions were not only unanswered, they were forbidden. The thrust to war went relentlessly forward, invoking the mantras that George Bush could be trusted to repeat endlessly in lieu of thoughtful persuasion: “he gassed his own people,” “WMD,” and “regime change.” This approach to the Iraq enterprise represents a sharp departure from the normal conduct of foreign policy. Politics usually involves long and serious discussions of various approaches to the world, debates over the … Continue reading Operation Hubris